Slashdot Mirror
Memory Holes and the Internet (updated)
blamanj writes "As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem. A recent Slashdot article discussed this in regard to the White House. Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam. How can we keep corporate America honest?" Update: 11/11 22:16 GMT by T : Declan McCullagh (former Time, Inc. employee, among other things) writes in with the non-conspiracy explanation for the change, below.
Declan writes "It is silly to claim that Bush Sr. and Scowcroft would strong-arm Time Inc. into removing an article from time.com -- when that article was an excerpt from their book that you can buy today from Amazon.com for $21.
Another explanation is more likely. And, yes, a quick search turns up a May 2003 article from Slate that debunks this rumor. It turns out that Time Inc. only had permission from the publisher to post the content for a limited time."
Archive.org, Google Cache, etc. all help.
The White House relies more than many previous administrations on the power of "top secret", and it should surprise no-one if they extend legislation like the Patriot Act into civil domains such as the Internet.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
selected memory loss.
--------
Free your mind.
By Google-caching everything!
You can't.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
How can we keep corporate America honest?
Wish as hard as you can. Maybe click your heels three times, for luck.
-kgj
Folks, not every move by a (liberal) magazine such as Time is because of the Bush cabal and their black helicopter enforcers.
Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will? This is done all the time in print and television media. Should be no surprise that certain things get "omitted" on an Internet site.
Website Missing Document?
Excerpt from "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, Time (2 March 1998):
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasio route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
> Folks, not every move by a (liberal) magazine such as Time is because of the Bush cabal and their black helicopter enforcers.
Care to present an alternate reason why it's missing, then?
Virg
Once you've published something on the internet, it's very hard to remove it. There are too many 'bots beavering away in the background. If I do a search for my name on google, I get info going all the way back to my post-grad days at college some 12 years ago....
The only real way to get rid of something is to pull it quickly.. leave it around and you've no chance......
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Since its becoming slashdotted, here is the cache
How can we keep corporate America honest?
Because it is now?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Maybe if you tought some of the millions of mindless drones clicking "I feel lucky" on google and taking everything they read as god breathed. In schools they need to be teaching kids to look at the source of their information closely, and in the workplace instead of teaching employees route memorization of "click here to check e-mail, click here to delete a message, click here to close e-mail...etc" teach them some basic computing principles, including conducting research on the internet.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
How can we keep corporate America honest?
Stop buying their products, to the extent possible. Or at least, try to minimize your spending, and direct your spending toward companies you approve of. Shop ever more aggressively for the lowest price.
Cancel TiVO and build your own PVR. Make sure you are getting the lowest phone rates.
Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck. Save up a little nest egg. Go all-cash and stop paying the credit-card vigorish.
A dollar in your pocket is the strongest vote you will ever have.
Everybody memorize a webpage. Instead of names we will be known as URLs. Before you die, you have to make someone else memorize your webpage so that none of the great literature on the web can ever be destroyed.
=C=
If you wanted me to agree with you, you shouldn't have given me Mod points.
> Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will? This is done all the time in print and television media. Should be no surprise that certain things get "omitted" on an Internet site.
It wasn't omitted. It was excised. It was there, and now it isn't, but all the rest of the contents of that issue still are.
Virg
They dont 'have to keep honest'. There is no law that says they have to keep a story in place forever..
Its their resources they use to do so... when they are finished with the story they can dump it..
As long as what they report is the truth ( or with a disclaimer that its opinion and not fact ) then they are within their rights to do what ever they want with THEIR data...
Now when the government does this, thats a different issue...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just go here:
CommonDreams
CounterPunch
Bad News: Noam Chomksy Archive
AlterNet
Or read a book.
Any good and honest right-wing folk (if you want to set up such a arbitrary left/right binary) should reply with their favorite truth-speaking resources.
Looks like somebody want's to remove the evidence that will make somebody look stupid. Maybe Bush should have talked to his daddy before invading Iraq
Straight answer: You can't. If a corporation has financial reason to do something, they will, period. No "morality" or "social conscience" or "concern for human freedom" will play into it. That's the way corporations work; committees and boards of trustees don't have any kind of hive-morality, only a concern for their company's bottom line.
If media corporations and content-providing conglomerates have a financial or political reason to alter their records, they will, and they have no legal reason to do otherwise. We can only hope that the open-standard-based free internet can survive and let us remember electronically.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
"I have no clear memory of that" seems to work fine for this crowd. Par for the course really. It is one thing to not publish something, but another thing entirely to place the grey tape over the issue and make it an un-article. Guess we started to take access to information for granted... ...enter the Ministry of Information!
How can you tell when a corporate suit (or lawyer, President, elected official, etc.) is not telling the truth?
Answer: His/Her lips move.
Lets face it, nobody wants to "Look bad" and if they can alter the records to "help you" forget what they said/did, they will do it. It's what keeps them in power and in control.
Or did we forget that its the winners that write the history books.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
From Archive.org, the most common result is "Error contacting servers."
Nothing has changed. The media have always told a coherant story. We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eruasia.
I think it's time to remember that the Internet is not a Parent nor is it a Governing Body. It is just a collection of writing. So you shouldn't come to it expecting truth or fairness. It just isn't that way.
You want to keep Corporate America honest? Two ways: government mandate and journalism. That's the way its always been done, always will be. By keeping the population informed (ideally) corporations and officials will have to be wellbehaved.
What is music when you despise all sound?
"Corporate America" is every bit as honest as the rest of America. And the rest of the world, for that matter.
Think about it.
Things will sort themselves out if the internet reamains a free place where anyone can get on as a peer and publish. New publications will replace the old ones that act like Time. If the internet becomes more like broadcast TV, where only $pecial people with credentials can publish, it won't be trusted and the information superhighway will be just another billboard.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Print publications follow the standard procedure of publishing official correction and retraction notices, but there doesn't seem to be any such standard convention in the online world. Some publications act more ethically than others. All should at least place a note at the top of an article if it has been changed, and withdrawn articles should have a withdrawal notice instead of a 404 page.
Terrorism. How do you stop an oppressive regime bent on destroying your rights? When they have an infinite amount of power and you have none? When even your right to vote is being dissolved, not that it made any difference what you voted in the first place...
Corporate executives are a cowardly lot, so I'd wager that a bullet in the head of a chosen few (the head of product development at Diebold Voting Systems for example) might make them think twice about their next amoral profit above all costs decision.
"great literature on the web" include the Blogs?
I do not no why this story was approved by slashdot admins. This is obviously another blatent attempt to attack President Bush on his decision to go into and remove Saddam from power. If this wasn't Bush-bashing... if it was, for instance, Clinton bashing, it would have been rejected in a second.
But no matter what anyone says, things have changed since September 11... and GW Bush is NOT GHW Bush. The two situations, the two men, are two different things and can not be compared. While the points made by GHW Bush in 1998 are true and accurate, they do not consider the relevance of such a move post 9/11.
The arguements will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq.. and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq, but current news would disagree with that assessment. Clinton's inaction in 1994 regarding N Korea has led to another rogue nation with nuclear weapons... leaving Saddam alone could have had the same effect.
How can we keep corporate America honest?
1) Be helpful. Inform Time Magazine to their 404 missing page.
2) Donate to The Memory Hole.
Please everyone: Follow the link to the pulled article. When it returns the 404 page, type "George Orwell" into the search box.
Someone at Time should take notice. (And no, we have never been at war with Oceania...)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
How can we keep corporate America honest?
This is clearly "spin" if I ever saw it. It's not just everybody's favorite whipping-boy "corporate America", but government, small business, large business, organizations, and individuals that lie. In short, the question should be: How can we keep anybody honest? There are several answers. Sites like Memory Hole, Archive, Wayback, etc. are good. Citizen's advocacy groups, and voting are other ways. Still another way is to seek to find the honest truth yourself and learn to discern fact from biased opinion.
Wayback Machine
--
I think, in retrospect, this is fascinating, given it was written in 1998, and taking into consideration what happened a few months ago in Iraq.
The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking.
What's REALLY worrying is when you read the extract from the article by Bush Snr you realise, slowly, just how shockingly inarticulate Jnr is...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
If you go to the TIMES table of contents thats posted on the "Memory Hole" page, you will see why the article is not online. Since it deals with a popular subject, TIMES moved it to their paid content... so the free version is no longer available. Go HERE and read the top line. In short, I doubt its a conspiracy, TIMES is just being greedy and wants more money. Which as a company is its right.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
Ordinary people can admit that they were wrong, that they've changed their minds, and that their attitudes now better fit the facts. It is a particularly scary trait of the current administration, and the military-industrial-media complex that plays the alga to its fungus in the lichen of the State, that it can't change its mind. If it's right now, it was always right, and if that's not how you remember things, well, just ask Time Magazine...
- - - Patent applied for and deliver us from evil
All I have to say is with all the censorship and scandal going around this country and it's government...it's getting pretty p-a-t-h-e-t-i-c, I think what's really sad is that this country has such a feeble-minded president currently, I think if Washington was here they would have already hung Bush and his son for insulting the English language and running this country like if it was a video game with infinite lives...take what I just said anyway you want to I preferred Clinton and I would not have been filled with such resentment towards Bush if I could actually find something about him to admire...starting a war is easy having the balls to do it yourself and finish it and not just sit next to the red phone waiting to release another command to troops to walk into some mines so they don't have to waste grenades...Peace,Freedom,and the pursuit of decent presidents that's all I ask.
What follows is a copy of his resignation speech in the House of Commons, which won applause from some backbenchers in unprecedented Commons scenes.
Sounds a lot like Ministry of Truth type stuff.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
You can find the missing page using the Wayback Machine.
As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem
I don't think what Time does on their site has any real bearing on what most reporters and researchers will find. This is because most of them use lexis nexis. It is my understanding that lexis nexis will keep a copy of the article (I'm not sure, it costs money to use). Even if it doesn't, it will keep references to it. It will be shown to exist.
What would cause for concern is lexis nexis removing stuff.
i don't like my old sig.
http://kornet.nu/blindhona/arkiv/000632.ht
Email them here:
Lets see how quickly we can fill that AOL mailbox.
Greedo shoots first! We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Nothing new. Not going away.
How do you keep people honest? Choose one: Honesty or Free Speech. Honest!
Free Speech includes the ability to retract what you've said before, in whatever way you choose to retract it (so long as this method does not infringe upon the rights of others). This means the ability to destroy some of the things you have created. IE if I own Times Magazine, and I print a million issues of my magazine, but it turns out I don't like the main story, I have the right to burn (well maybe not literally burn as there might be an air quality problem there) all copies of the magazine, without ever letting you read it.
As for honesty? Well, the memory hole does a decent job of that already, if people pay attention.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Why is the mainstream press not picking up this, and the Diebold quagmire?
I don't want to go all Oliver Stone here, but where did the second results card come from in the 2000 presdiential election and why didn't the press jump on it?
Dammit, I hate it when people only tell half the story...
The reason it was a bad idea was because we had to agree in advance NOT to go after saddam in order to gain support for the war from the arab coalition members.
Had we gone after saddam, we would have betrayed the trust of those nations with which we had an agreement and would never be trusted again...
Never trust excerpts.. ever..
Geez...
Yeah, if you could even GET 32MB simm's back in 1993...
<shudder>
How can we keep corporate America honest?"
Bush or Time magazine?
Photos.
Seriously anyone with power can lie and manipulate. It's often funny how many people assume the media is honestly trying to present the facts without manipulation.
See the following:
CNN planted question at debate
Fraud at NYT
Of the acceptance of SlashDot into the ranks of the ULTRA-LIBERAL MEDIA ELITE?!
HUH!?!?
WHEN IS IT?!?!
We have fair use rights with other copyrighted material. We're allowed to save a copy on our VCR for personal use. We're allowed to keep that magazine that we bought.
It should apply to hypertext as well.
You should, no imho you ARE allowed to save a copy of a hypertext page for your own personal use. Heck your browser does it right now, the only difference between "temporary" and "permanent" is a couple bytes of configuration information.
Henceforth you can use your personal copy in order to excercise other fair use rights, like quoting the source work in subsequent copyrighted publications of your own.
Now *here* is an example of why fair use should, nay MUST be allowed - because otherwise it would allow "technological measures" to prevent citizens of a free nation from looking into their past at what others have "publicly stated" and said previously. (Yes, I consider a public-facing website to be a public forum - man we need that codified in law as well.)
Most importantly, this is a concrete example which *any* politician will be able to understand in an instant!!
so funny I forgot to laugh
And remember that Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
What's up with Slashdot? Trying to get to the site today and all I get is this whiny political bullshit from Kiroshin. They redirecting because slashdot is down?
Huh? It's his first post ever. Yes it's stupid karma whoring. The site wasn't even slow.
No, definitely not a troll.
There is an excellent article in the Economist about this, unfortunately for subscribers only. Here is a pertinent quote:
A case in point is the near-total secrecy in which the Department of Homeland Security was hatched. No cabinet secretary was consulted. Nor were most senior advisers. The largest government reorganisation in half a century, involving huge numbers of civil servants and tricky questions of government relations, was decided upon by a handful of people (originally four, with aides) and without serious consultation with Congress. Did that improve the quality of decisions?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Speech: U.S. Senator
U.S. SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY
This is from The Hive. Check out LibertyThink also.
Viva Le Revolution!!!!!
Remember, this is politics, not reality.
It's obvious by reading it that the pulled article was an attempt by the elder Bush to convince the people of America that not going in the first time was a good idea after he was challenged on the decision. It's not what he really thinks.
It's a basic spin move - rather than admit that "we can't" or "we screwed up" it gives reasons why "we didn't" that sound like they make sense. They don't really believe them -they just hopw you buy them.
So, since it is crafted as face-saving, the text doesn't represent fact or opinion. To actually hold someone to a this in the political arena is kind of like cheating.
What this is is a sort of internet mulligan.
Ah yes, and here we have the "Bush is worse than Stalin" insinuation. Was wondering when you were going to show up.
So predictable.
First, for those who believe a magazine has the right to pull what they want from their archives... GET A F&*#$%G GRIP. Sure, not archiving it would be ok. But removing it from the table of contents? And only removing one article from the free public archives, one that goes against the political climate of the day? Smells like a 1984 fish.
As to keeping corporations honest. Easy: make it more profitable.
Or, put another way: make it really expensive to be dishonest.
A slashdotting of the issue hopefully means a lot of us are less likely to buy Time. I would also encourage those with a subscription to ask for a cancellation and refund.
Markets can be pretty effective mechanism. Right now the markets reward unethical behaviour. If we change the inventive structure, we will get different results. Make a point of buying from sources that give more information, boycott those that don't, tell your friends.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
...by content providers, perhaps more easily than things they published on the internet or on paper.
I worked for a company that provided large quantities of content to Lexis-Nexis for six years. They provide a method by which content can be removed by anyone who is providing it.
And my experience dealing with Lexis-Nexis as a company did not leave me with a good feeling about their concern for an accurate record.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
So...why is it even notable that they removed an article pertaining to more than a decade ago over a situation everyone in their right mind knows about? More retarded slashdot political-hack activism, -1
The "Liberal Media" is a myth. It used to be like that, but over the last 10 years the bulk of the media in the US, and in fact many countries has ended up in the hands of a small group of very wealthy men.
It should not be surprising that these men have a rather more conservative point of view than the press owners who they bought out.
By and large, today's media speaks for the establishment, and in the US the establishment is a Republican one.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam.
This is news?
Doesn't everyone know that Americans enjoy the ultimate in the free market economy, including the best media and government that money can buy?
I'm voting for either Britney Spears or Lara Croft in the next election. They're a lot more uplifting than these old guys that keep running.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
How's that for twisted? The default search is "Articles since 1985". :)
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Pretend it never happened. Change history.
That is all.
Why is it important for this to be posted on
There's absolutely no geek factor here anywhere!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
That sounds like you think they were honest at some point! When was that? I must have missed it.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Given enough eyes, all conspiracy theories are shallow. No need to put the blame on Stalinist revision when good ol' supply and demand accounts for it just fine.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Is that archive.org will remove pages from the index if you ask, and will dutifully respect robots.txt files.
If robots.txts are carefully used, a file can be kept out of archive.org and robots.txt forever.
And it isn't really like archive.org, if it saw these as a problem, could ignore robots.txt files, since the most common reason for robots.txt is to keep a crawler from falling into a CGI script containing something that, from a crawler standpoint, is a bottomless pit of randomly generated links to itself.
of a bullet between the eyes.
Just remember the rule of revolution : don't burn anything that you can't personally recreate.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
What's funny is that when a company like Belkin or Verisign perverts "neutral" technology in order to make money, the Slashdot crowd goes nuts: "They can't do that," and "This is an outrage!" Why? Because these companies are abandoning solid principles that founded the Internet and that many technologist believe in. The Internet will become a chaotic mess if such behavior continues unchecked.
Time magazine was founded on principles as well, namely that the truth shall be uncovered and good journalistic pratices will be adhered to. Sure it's an impossible goal. But to deliberately conceal the truth and erase history is a direct abandonment of those principles. It's a bad thing that's going on here.
Just as we get upset over Verisign's hijacking of the Internet, we can't let a huge mega-corporation like Time-Warner, that controls such a large chunk of the media landscape, think it's OK to shape our perception of reality to suit their corporate interests.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Gore Quotes The media is trying to forget this stuff, but do you remember when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were on a televised tour of Monticello, the historic home of Thomas Jefferson? Al Gore paused in the entrance and blinked up at four busts over the door, depicting Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette. as the CSPAN cameras rolled the veep-elect inquired "who are these guys?" The best part is watching Bill turn and shake his head.
Why not create a distributed memory system for preventing memory holes? It could be called something like "Remember@Home" and would rely on all the empty disk space on people's computers to redundantly store everything on the internet.
The client software would watch what you download and coordinate more permanent caching of those internet documents in some "empty" portion of your HD. Distributed coordination in a P2P network structure would help prioritize what is stored where --leveling the number of copies of each document across the network. Most of the operation would be relatively lightweight on bandwidth -- exchanging only metadata about who has what stored. Only occassionally would the system ask for a copy of the content from one person's cache to be copied to another person's cache (such as to relevel the storage if too many backup copies of a peice of content are lost).
The idea requires a great deal of work on how to detect irrelvant differences in dynamic content, distributed coordination, local journaling, optimum metadata routing, etc. But it could be a rather interesting project that has applications for robust massively distributed storage systems.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I've seen the NYT change the title of an article or rework a paragraph or two a few days later... usually it significantly
... this way we can watchdog news angencies which are making up spin on the fly.
alters the spin of the article.
The most egregious case I've seen to date is msnbc changing the entire article completely. This article, entitled "U.N. urges inspectors return to Iraq" is dated Oct. 13, and completely replaced this article, entitled "Rumsfeld acknowledges intelligence may have been bad", dated Oct. 2. Now it could be something to do with how they number their articles, but given it's Nov. 11 now (a month after oct. 13) and the article has not been changed and that the replacement article was 11 days after the article it was replacing, I don't think so. Unfortunately since the time I took note of this (about a week or so ago), google has recached the page, thus destroying its record of the old article. Also, wayback machine didn't get it either... the only record I can find now that google has been recached is a reprint on this blog . Which of course probably violates msnbc's copyright to boot.
I dunno...perhaps someone needs to set up something to archive major news sources more frequently than wayback and check for *changes*
It's crazy... print doesn't have this problem.... once it's out, it's out, but on the 'net we seem to be able to have revisionist history, soviet style.
Times change. While what you say is definately the status of current law, it is certainly OK to question whether that law is a good idea.
Once upon a time, like oh, say, a decade ago, the only significant way to communicate for a company was to send forth written things, or videotaped things, or more generally things not under their control. We could then archive those things freely, and the company would not even be aware of it; libraries don't have to register with National Geographic that they are storing X years of their magazine, and National Geographic wouldn't care anyhow.
Copyright and other related laws were created to balance the interests of content "creators" and "consumers". (I put those in quotes because I no longer believe in that dichotomy, but for the purposes of this discussion we can use the terms.) If the balance changes, it's fair to question whether the laws should also change.
Does Archive.org have a right to exist? Or can the company now go after Archive.org and force the removal of their content, no matter what Archive.org wants? How does that affect the balances we've chosen as a society?
It's not obvious. It's probably not beneficial to society to allow people to whitewash history and allow only them to keep the history because they own an all-trumping "copyright" on it. That way lies 1984, only in the book the Ministry of Truth had to hire lots and lots of people to do the modifications since they didn't have computers. Sure, the companies have no obligation to maintain content forever, but can they prevent everyone else from doing so too? Should we create a "right to archive"? Should the public be allowed in to such an archive? How do we archive fee-based content? Do we need a legal concept of "abandonware"?
The real question is not what the companies have to do, but what we are allowed to do with "their" stuff to prevent them from pulling the wool over society's eyes.
These are not easy questions, but they really can't be answered with "This is what the law says now, it's it and that's that."
until test -f not.there ; do wget -O /dev/null 'http://www.time.com/time/searchresults?query=Geor ge%20Orwell&venue=time&search_date_range=all&from_ month=1&from_day=1&from_year=1985&to_month=12&to_d ay=31&to_year=2002' ; done
Not true.
The table of contents still lists all the other articles - if you click on any one of them (for example this one you get the first paragraph, and then an invitation to buy the rest of the article. Fine, that's their right - it costs money to archive so many pages...
But the article is question isn't listed - and the link given by The Memory Hole doesn't offer to sell you the article, it says it has been deleted.
And it's nothing to do with it being a 'popular subject' - Time states quite clearly that it's only issues over 2 years old that are archived, not 'historically important' ones.
Mark
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
Consider all the deregulation since St. Ronnie. Folks, there was a *REASON* for all the regulation, and it ain't because that legislators sit around thinking of regulations, any more than they do right now; it was because of overwhelming outrage by the public, who had been screwed by business.
How to keep 'em honest?
For a start, in the overwhelming majority of cases where money is concerned, "self-regulation" doesn't work, nor does regulation work when the regulatory agency is in bed with the industry (vide the SEC or the FCC).
Things that *might* help, to keep the regulators and politicians *more* honest*, would be:
1) a law preventing any member of a regulatory
body (or a legislator, or administrator)
from being employed (or consulting
for) a regulated company for, say, five
years (non-compete clause, anyone?)
2) a law overturning the 1977 (78?) Supreme
Court ruling, stating that money is NOT
Constitutionally protected political free
speech (anyone want to argue that you,
here, have the same visibility as, say,
Bill the Gates?)
3) a fixed limit on campaing spending: NO ONE
allowed to spend more than x dollars on a
campaign for x office.
4) limit consolodation in any industry: two or
three multinationals is not competition
At least, that would be a beginning....
mark
Later, after the Iraqi's realized it was an 'occupation', the transtion from peacemaking to fighting was not as much sudden as it was inexorable.
+&x
Is pop a terrorist now?
That all depends on the content in question... and who you rely on to mirror it.
The first issue has to do with the sheer magnatude of content out there. There's a lot of stuff to mirror unless one was picky about what was mirror-worthy (unless one has unlimited resources). Then there's the fact that some things are removed before one has a chance to see it, much less mirror it.
Enter Google. Massive system - impressive resources. Wide-scale mirroring. But as much as I like Google, they've proven to be very succeptible to presure. Google has a history of removing content on request. Google's service is great. But one can't rely on Google to provide an immutable record.
And its not just Google. Other sources of possible mirrors also bow to external presure. Though before we get too critical of these organizatoins, one has to remember that the legal framework in which they operate tends to favor revisionists. Especially if they can claim copyright.
Esentially, its the standard game of whack-a-mole with "mole" being played by anybody willing to mirror the content.
This leads to grass-roots efforts to keep stuffing the system with moles / mirrors faster than revisionists can whack. Such a strategy can be fairly successful depending on the tenacity of the revisionist and the number of mirror participants. But then - this requires an initial copy of the content in question before its initial removal as well as a cause people are willing to support.
Yes, the nature of the Internet makes revisionists' jobs more difficult. But not impossible.
Through creative editing you can make somebody seem to be saying whatever you wish. Perhaps Time thought twice about misquoting Mr. Bush.
At the time many thought this 26 MARCH 2003 article from The Onion was a joke
Looking back at the article today, it's not funny , just very very sad.VOTE!
First of all the whitehouse.gov story was completely bogus that robots.txt file was correct!!!! non of those pages were valid they were all 404s but whitehouse.gov server doesn't response with 404s. So, it was a web admins quick and dirty hack to fix the problem and kindly save web crawlers the burden of indexing crap pages!! Ingence is bliss here on slashdot
Ignant Ingant Ingant!!!!
Secondly, That story in time was bogus!!!
RAHHH!!!
Such unfounded Ingence!!
This is just an excuse to lash out at the current U.S. administration. Half of you are outraged that a company has removed a news article. The other half of you are railing against GW Bush and his decision to follow through on the consequences outlined in UN resolutions.
As far as Time is concerned, they can publish or not publish or pull what they like. As many of you have shown, the Internet has a memory and did not forget the article. If you care so much, then don't buy/subscribe to Time.
As far as the Bush bashers in the crowd are concerned, you need to learn to take things in their full context and not try to turn something to your advantage. A previous poster pointed out that the world as we knew it when Bush Sr. was President was very different from our world today. The article very clearly states that the reason the first Coalition did not try to topple the Sadam regime was due to the fact that this was not a goal of the Coalition. The Coalition would not have minded seeing a coup take Sadam out of power. However, they were not fighting for that reason. The second Coalition against Sadam was formed for the express purpose of removing Sadam from power. It was determined that Iraq under Sadam would never comply with UN resolutions.
As for the question asked concerning how do we keep corporations honest, I would submit that it is not possible to keep them entirely honest. We can continue to regulate and mandate. However, in the end corporations are run by human beings, and humans will invariably make a poor decision somewhere along the way.
Mirror.
Memory hole is a great site, glad to see it mentioned here. I don't think that we need to be policing magazine articles, rather financial reports.
I couldn't agree more - JMS, in a nod to 1984, had a great sequence in a Babylon5 episode called The Deconstruction of Falling Stars in which a regime promotes 'good-facts' in order to sell their pertinant propaganda - you wouldn't want those 'real-facts' to get in the way, would you? Changing your mind is one thing - trying and change the reality of recent history to better suit your current position is quite another!
Jeez, how lame-brained of you, especially since you appear to be using some of your thinking capacity. You're just refusing to see the bigger picture.
Time's expurgation of a single article from an online edition of a print magazine is not directly, if at all, motivated by Time's consideration of their "bottom line." To all appearances, the expurgation of the article in question is politically motivated. You argue that No "morality" or "social conscience" or "concern for human freedom" will play into it, but from anything I can see it is precisely terms such as those you reject which motivated Time's editorial staff to censor their own publication.
blog
No problem: Just backup the internet!
Geee. how many times do I have to tell people to just make backups.
--
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death -- G.W. Bush
If, like me, you have a two-way tinfoil hat and hesitated to believe Memory Hole without proof, have a look at this PDF. It's a "teacher-aid" document from the Times (some sort of coursework on actuality based on Times article), and it mentions the "disappearing article".
Not only is the Times playing at Big Brother, they are not even competent when doing this... A simple Google search restricted to the times website found that in 2 sec.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
I didn't read the article yet. But the topic of why Bush Sr. didn't take out saddam during the gulf war has come up in conversations.
During the gulf war, as soon as the ground war started, and earlier, you had dan rather sticking his microphone in the faces of residents of Israel to interview them, asking them how terrified they were of the scud missiles, and how terrified they were of whether the scud missiles were tipped with chemical weapons or not, with references to the holocaust. You had dan rather interviewing one individual, and the guy saying that maybe israel should drop THE BOMB (nuclear came out of his mouth) on saddam to get it over with (in broken english/yiddish). And you had dan rather twisting the guy's words, reporting back, "there, you heard it folks, they are afraid of saddam sending a nuclear bomb atop one of those missiles" (paraphrased).
Was that deliberate? Probably not. dan rather is a blathering idiot. He heard what he wanted to hear, not what the guy was saying. He heard what fits his personal beliefs about the war, and his personal beliefs about the whole situation. What he reported that night, and for the duration of the war was how the war was a mistake, and how things will be worse, even if the US wins the war.
Just as is happening now.
And for more relevance to your post and the topic of the slashdot article, you had dan rather reporting repeatedly, for several nights in a row, about the "Highway of Death". You remember that, right?
The "Highway of Death" was saddam's army attempting to steal whatever vehicles and equipment they could from the country they invaded, and drive everything north back into iraq. But they got caught. And it turned into a shoot the fish in the barrel situation. And the dan rather delighted in bringing to cbs evening news, and the dinner table, images of a destroyed convoy of trucks and equipment that had been taken out by air strikes, including images of burned corpses and body parts. The day after each night of corpses being shown on the "Highway of Death", international protestations grew louder and louder over the US stopping the war. Threats were made of coalition partners, especially of arab partners, pulling out of the coalition and aligning against the US.
There was no stomach for the US, or the allies, to go in and get saddam.
Now I'll be interested to read what Bush Sr. wrote.
And as for revisionism, time magazine is as left as dan rather. It was in time magazine that the false claim that it is 34x more likely that a gun in the home will kill someone in your family than be used in self defense began its major journey into legend. A legend that has been thoroughly debunked by Gary Kleck's research, and others, including widely known liberal professors.
Time magazine is faced with the fact that historians have failed to trash Ronald Reagan's tenure, and have instead given Ronald Reagan credit where credit is due, giving him the proper attributes in the events that unfolded during and after his Presidency. Time magazine does not want this to happen to Bush Sr. Time magazine wants to help along their pet theory that Bush Sr. blew the first Gulf war, and the US paid the consequences of that war. Time magazine is positioning itself to eliminate Bush Sr. justifications for his actions, and to prevent its own magazine from helping to maintain a balanced view of the Bush family presidencies. Time magazine wants their view of the world to prevail.
Knowing the extreme left slant of a huge number of articles of Time magazine over 30 years of reading and running across their articles, especially their left slanted articles that appear on issues that are just coming up for votes in Congress or for other planned political action (death penalty, abortion, gun control, vietnam, military actions, trade, welfare, and so many more), I'd say that these reasons are why the article is missing, rather than world domination and black helicopters.
And I've seen the black helicopters, btw. They are totally silent until they are directly over your head (less than 50 feet) for your info, and totally silent as they move off.
Ah yes, but it's a subtle irony, and not entirely relevant, as no one is going to come and arrest me for posting dissenting opinions, whether anon or logged.
And occasionally I post anonymously like that solely to annoy people like you... it always works.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.
Except he thought it was a blueprint, not a warning...
On that 404 page it tells you to report broken links, and gives an address for that purpose. They also ask you to paste the non-functioning URL into the message.
Clearly this article was ++ungood, and needed to be edited by one of the historians at the Ministry of Truth...err, Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that this article will re-appear shortly in it's correct form, proving George Bush Sr. desperately wanted to invade Iraq and capture Sadaam during the first Gulf War, but was thwarted by the evil schemings of Eastasia...err, the Liberals.
I recall that this very "problem" is one Clifford Stoll expected all those years ago when he wrote "Silicon Snake Oil".
The ability to revise history on the 'Net is far too easy since there are so few copies of any particular piece of content... and, despite the ability to make copies, the ability to distribute them relies on an infrastructure that cannot always be trusted.
So now history may be revised. What happens when we have no foundation to build upon?
(Wondering whether Lysenko's biology better fits the 'Net than it did... biology.)
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
Considering the original was written pre 9/11, my guess would be that the author no longer feels that way. This has nothing to do with keeping corporate America honest. This has to do with keeping a web site relavent and up to date. No one is trying to HIDE what he said, and it is print and freely available all over the place (google is your friend)
The world changes, no one expects us to follow the policies as laid out in the cold war toward the Soviet Union. With that in mind, I believe it is only the painfully naive that would suggest that we treat the world the same way we did pre 9/11.
I think the 300,000+ bodies in mass graves, and the payments to suicide bombers post Gulf War I show us that Bush Sr. was mistaken.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Orson wells, eat your heart out!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
At the time I figured the coalition stopped out of general political inertia, but this really is a well-thought-out explanation. It's remarkable how well it describes what has actually happened. Aparrently there are people near the top who know what they're doing, after all. Good.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Table of Contents
;-)
Please Note: The March 02, 1998 issue of TIME Magazine is now premium paid content on TIME.com. If you have questions about payment options click here.
ARCHIVE PASS
24-hour pass ($4.95)
Why pay $2.50/article when our day pass lets you access as many articles as you would like in 24 hours?
30-day pass
A good value at only $9.95 for 30-days' unlimited access
Let's say I pay the $10 and still don't find the article. Do I get my money back? Only one way to find out. But you try it first
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Read the other replies to parent's comment - the explanation is not as simple as this poster assumes. All of the other articles in the given issue are also paid content, however are still listed under the given issue rather than having been 'disappeared'.
The article has been entirely removed from the archive. I tried to find it using their advanced search function and the article in question simply doesn't exist.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Isn't this what Micro$oft 2003 server with ShadowCopy is for?
Winston Smith thought that hope lay in the proles. We know that it actually lies in the Google cache ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Columnist James Poniewozik's current article talks about CBS bowing to politcal preasure and not Airing the 4 hr Mini series "Reagans". Perhaps he'd have an opinion on Time Mazagine pulling articles that have already been printed? I asked him perhaps more people should.
-Jason
"How can we keep corporate America honest?"
No, you mean to say, how to we keep people honest with respect to the WWW! It seems that popular culture right now is to inject corporation-bashing even when it is misleading to do so. So this article, while pointing out an instance of bad journalism, is itself bad journalism!
I think it really sucks that this trend of corporation bashing and anti-terrorism garbage is going to lead this country into a stagnation never before seen in the USA and only historically seen in the fiercest dictatorships. Do these people really know what road they are choosing?!?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The 404 page asks you to send an email to daily@timeinc.net and report the link.
Don't bother. I did already and asked for the new location of the document. Guess what I got in return:
<daily@timeinc.net>: host relay.pathfinder.com[209.251.208.18] said: 550 5.1.1
<daily@timeinc.net>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)
ARGH!
I've been told that the same passage appears on page 489 of Bush and Scowcroft's book, A World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
Couldn't it be that they didn't have the rights to publish this piece online? It's pretty common to break up electronic/world/us/etc. rights in publishing, and it's possible that Time only had rights to publish this in its magazine in print form.
Memory holes are nothing new. In it's more violent forms, executions and book burnings have been around for quite a while.
What's truly disturbing is the ease and stealth with which they can be created in digital media. In the world of paper, it would be a laborious and highly visible undertaking, almost impossible to cover up.
How many other memory holes are out there, possibly never to be discovered?
AC
Let's edit:
"Apparently there were people near the top who know what they were doing,"
Take a good long look at the neocon "think tanks" from which our current foreign policy took its core. They regard the position George H.W. Bush took toward Iraq as a sign of weakness; they explicitly pushed for a unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East so as to re-shape that part of the world, well before 9/11.
The concerns the senior Bush shows in this article simply irritate(d) the high-ups in our current administration. The multilateral model, the concern about becoming de facto rulers of Iraq -- all that just bespeaks an America too wussy to step up to the plate, in the view of people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying out this basic policy during the 90's.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I went looking for the cover art and found the link to the table of contents http://www.time.com/time/magazine/list/0,11627,110 1980302,00.html
Interesting how much effort they went to in order to expunge any reference to this piece.
anyone notice the first search result is titled The George Orwell Doublespeak Explanation?
Unfortunately you have to purchase the "full" article (all 51 words of it) or already have a membership.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
My humblest appologies to the former president... harshest criticisms to the current.
The Table of Contents no longer has the article -- history has changed even more!
Resident Bush is an (A) who is surrounded by (B)
Cheney is the Illuminati, Bush Jr is the puppet. If he was smart, ol' junior would have listened to his Dad rather than uncle Dick.
The Wayback Machine, baby. You can't lie to an archival robot.
Uh oh.. Looks like a memory hole swallowed www.thememoryhole.org:
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUERY SECTION:
;; www.thememoryhole.org, type = NS, class = IN
;; Total query time: 6 msec
;; FROM: bliga.ncsa.uiuc.edu to SERVER: default -- 141.142.2.2
;; WHEN: Tue Nov 11 10:04:11 2003
;; MSG SIZE sent: 39 rcvd: 39
.org whois server though... Either a horribly ironic failure occured or the Memory Hole really exists... What gives?
% dig www.thememoryhole.org ns
; > DiG 8.3 > www.thememoryhole.org ns
It still showing up on the
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Was this kind of like the briefings Clinton gave to GWB during transition, about how he had to keep his eye on Al Quaeda, and how that one issue would chew up more of his time than he would ever imagine?
That was before US State policy turned away from the Middle East and began focusing on ballistic missile defense.
Which was before US State policy got forcibly re-focused on the Middle East
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It is news to me that there is a Canadian brigade in Iraq. Do you have any proof of this? Canadians are generally against the war in Iraq and our government has stated that other than a small number of soldiers on exchange with our allies, there are no Canadian troops in Iraq. If your claim is true, this is an incredible scandal.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Because, if I remember correctly, they aren't the only news source in the world. That is the thing: there is one government yet many sources of discourse.
This is why you don't drink from just one well.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Why is virtually no one pointing out that the print version is still widely available at libraries across the country. Regardless of the motivations behind the web retraction (and I wouldn't be surprised if their motives were either cowardly or sleazy) the simple fact is that the contents of that essay are still widely available, to virtually every American. You can't suppress past issues of a publication that gets sent out to hundreds of thousands of Americans every week.
The web is still in its infancy, and is relatively unreliable for serious research compared with the mature print industry. Anyone who treats a standalone web site as a credible primary source needs to be whacked with a clue-by-four anyway. Web sites of publications like this are slightly more credible precisely because there are thousands of pulp versions of the same content that we can compare them to if there are disputes over what was originally written.
There aren't any, that's my point. There also aren't any Russians, or Germans, or Egyptians. I was disagreeing with the assertion that World opposition to the US/UK involvement in Iraq was limited to just France. At the same time I was doing a bit of ass covering because there are more countries taking part in the coalition than just the US/UK, very small involvement, but they're there. I just knew some wise-ass would say "what about Poland?"
I guess if you take a "balanced" position that leaves you open for misinterpretation from both sides.
-sam
I was just here, where did I go?
"The messages [Winston] had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.... As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record."
Wow! Yellow journalism at its finest.
Two weeks ago, Slashdot posts a story trying to create a conspiracy theory that the White House is hiding material about Iraq from search engines. A few days later, someone actualy *asks* the White House, thus finding a perfectly reasonable explanation (they had 2 websites, both practically a copy of the other, so they didn't want people to see duplicates of the same article on search results).
Fast forward to today, and Slashdot does it again! Yay for yellow journalism! They reference an article, speculate on it, but refuse to check up on how true their conpiracy theories are. Even worse, they point to the 2 week old article by essentially saying "See! Look! It happened in past!", while almost completely ignoring Slashdot themselves already found an explanation for it.
I can't recall. Could you repeat the question.
No, I'm afraid I don't remember.
No...you are an asshole - that thinks he's a vole, and whom should crawl back into his stinking dark hole.
He is incompetent. He is not retarded.
The article and references to it were deleted.
But the deletion was noted and the original is now available again.
Along with a story about how it was deleted.
So he tries to be devious and cunning but he fails because he is incompetent.
Did I upset your worldview?
http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.htm
Look at this page, and as you are looking, reflect upon it, asking yourself if any other leader of any other country at any point in history would have reacted even remotely similarly.
If this doesn't convince you that The Idiot isn't in charge of the country - or worse, that the 9-11 attack was expected, which is the obvious conclusion from the hundreds of reports from the CIA, FBI and other intelligence reports from around the world which were wilfully ignored - then I'm not sure what will.
I know, it's not exactly surprising, but...
FOX News used to have a great article that, once you looked past the spin, admitted that the intent of the electorate in Florida was to elect Gore. That if there had been a statewide recount with any chosen consistent set of rules for the disputed votes, Gore would have won, electoral college or not.
The URL was http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,38554,00.html
Fox were cleverer than TIME, and managed to prohibit archive.org from serving up the old article. If anyone knows where to find an archive copy, I'd be very interested.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Here are some NYTimes columnists who should be writing about this:
krugman@nytimes.com (Paul Krugman)
nicholas@nytimes.com (Nicholas Kristoff)
liberties@nytimes.com (Maureen Dowd)
As for personal privacy, I assume that was already gone long before the DHS so it's not the biggest issue as I see it. But the big issue that I do see is that we're seeing the biggest drop in overseas college admissions since WWII. The surveys for this year showed that the students specifically stated either real or perceived problems with the DHS for their decision not to study in the US.
Well, for the xenophobes this is great, but for the rest of the US this is not good news at all. Despite the compaints about foreigners filling our colleges, those kids were formerly paying through the nose for all sorts of services. It's not like overseas students pay the same tuition as citizens. They definitely pay their way and then some and that's not to count their consmption while they're in the States. Many of them are very well funded and watching that revenue stream dry up is not a good thing. This is not to even begin to mention the free research assistance that they provide.
It's not that they're disapearing either, they're heading for the UK em masse. So, it's not about the war per se, it's about the DHS itself. Changing those trends back to the US could take years even if the DHS was dismantled today.
My inital response to those who rely on the internet as a research authority is "more fool you".
Short of a non-volatile variant on the Wayback Machine or Google cache (aside: Isn't it about time that someone set up an evidence vault along the lines of the system used by the journo's in TRANSMETROPOLITAN?) the internet cannot be deemed authoritative or permanent in any way in and of itself.
The innate value of the data on the internet is a function of the motivation of the publisher, and as such is skewed beyond the most lax standard of academic impartiality.
But but... we have the internet now. One of the big advantages of the internet is that it can be a vehicle for anybody whether they're a big corporation or not.
For sure, internet.com will continue to act like the old days, when dissemination of info was reserved to a privileged few. Corporations are slow to change.
But there is always internet.org, where we can post any info we want anytime (within reason of course). Just like we're doing now, here in slashdot.
How can we keep the corporations honest? By patronizing more of internet.org and less of internet.com. The more we do this, the less power the corporations will have and the less options they will have to be dishonest.
An archive search for the title produces no hits.
Write letters to the editor. Contact a local or national news outlet. Contact a competitor to Time. Get the news out of slashdot and into the public.
Editor of Time.com - daily@timeinc.net
Editor of Time - letters@time.com
--
make install -not war
...not only is always written by the winners, but also always has different sides.
Face it, if you witness an event, you will tell your side of the story. Someone else witnessing the same event will necessarily have other views (both objective and subjective!). Since history often is analyzed by people who didn't even directly witness the event, it gets even worse.
Truth is an ideal. Reality is one thing, the perception of reality another.
Bottom line is you always have to take anything you hear/read with a grain of sand (or several grains sometimes...).
On another note, though, it is still ridiculous for Time to bow to the powers that be and allow a published article to magically "disappear". Kudos to the watchers out there and the Internet to allow us to see this, and kudos for the freedom to point it out... can you imagine how many things like this have happened before? Books burnt, text passages blacked out... sheesh.
Whether it is the right thing to do or not also depends upon the cost in lives and dollars that we'll have to pay.
Saddam was not worth the cost of American lives or American dollars.
We should not have gone in without UN backing.
> a vote for bush 2004 is a vote for world war III
Or as the bumper sticker says, Bush/Cheny - Four More Wars!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So, telling lies is the most extreme expression of freedom that you can think of?
...Henrik Ibsen
Seems very likely you are a lawyer! Whatever you might be, you certainly have no sense of honor, pride or self worth...
It's the freedom to tell the truth and not fear the consequences that should matter to us more than anything.
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society.
The biggest spending budgets have been Bush Jr, Bush Sr. and Reagan - Clinton's budgets were smaller, if you subtract the entitlements inserted into each by everybody's predecessors. Of them all, only Clinton balanced the budget into a vast surplus, partly by winding down the profligate military budget, without disrupting the economy or political stability. Each of those Republican presidents vastly increased the budget, the deficit, the debt, and the size of government, and each has started a recession/depression in their first couple of years. By subsidizing corporations, the military, and the uppermost class crossover of the two, at the expense of the public. More accurate:
Liberal: spends public money on the public, people
Conservative: spends public money on private corporations
--
make install -not war
In my mind time magazine is guilty of fraud and false advertising (INAL).
Users who shell out the money for paid access to the archive can reasonably expect to have access to all articles in the issue. Instead they're not getting what they paid for.
Why does this matter? Paid content on the net is outrageously expensive. ($3 for an article when you could have brought the whole magazine for that much in 1998.) Presumably users who pay that kind of money do so to avoid the hassle of walking to the library. They have been tricked into believing that online access is just as good as access to the physical copy.
These people have been cheated. I for one hope some sleezy class action lawyer sues Time for this. I know subscribers would get next to nothing but atleast there would some consequences for Time.
Perhaps Time has a legitiment reason not to include the article. (They don't own the copyright and Bush et. al. won't let them reprint it.) That's fine but they should explain why the article's missing. They should also include as much information about the article as fair use allows.
Sure wish i knew mexican :T
Sig not found.
On a related note, I notice that this account, that I just started to use again, had an new ID reallocated, and that I couldn't find my past posts neither via Slashdot links nor via goggle search (site:.slashdot.org). I hope that it's not because I once criticized Linux zealots.
. . . donate some money to The Memory Hole and ensure it stays around.
On September 11th, it was reported that Rueter's and other news outfits that observers witnessed something to the effect of a missle being shot at Flight 93 prior to it crashing in Pennsylvania. Within an hour, these stories were pulled.
Multiple witnesses described a streak across the sky momentents before the plane crashed. This was instantly covered up.
Dada ended art.
Maybe millions of micropayments could somehow compete with the big special interests? Somehow?
The only thing different since 9/11 is the US's reaction to terrorism.
It is the height of political correctness to claim that "things have changed since September 11".
9/11 did not have anything to do with Iraq and Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq.
But Al Qaeda does have something to do with Iraq now and the reason for that is because American invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Opium production in Afghanistan is generating billions of dollars in revenue and huge chunks of that money is going straight to the terrorists who use it to buy weapons and pay people to keep the war going in Iraq.
Saddam didn't even have the supplies to start a nuclear weapon research program. Keeping Saddam under UN observation seems to have worked because he didn't even get to build chemical weapons. Saddam wasn't a threat to America.
I wrote it before on Slashdot: because everyone depends more and more on the internet for their information, it is very important that big search engines like Google stay objective. That is: that they should spend big efforts on preventing that people trick Google into returning only THEIR opinion and such.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Unless he was sent by Clinton. But you said he did it on his own.
How can we keep corporate America honest?
Easy. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
1984 was the first thing i thought. pretty soon it'll be north korea and not iraq that we've been fighting against, and all the double-think sheeple will sip their latte's and diregard the difference. big brother's out there kicking somebody's ass regardless.
Geeze...I'm sure there are quite a few copies of that magazine and article in paper form or micro-whatever. Geeze...
I mean, you shouldn't be using one source for your research anyway. Especially the internet!
Blar.
Doubleplus good memory bordering on crimethink.
America has always been at war with Iraq.
Why not? What idiot mod'ed that as "informative"?
but the easiest way is to say that different people here have different opinions of bush. some of us consider him some sort of a moron, some of us consider him some sort of evil dictator [mastermind] intent on securing his power and the power of those around him. if you have a room with four people, and two each beleive the above, you will see a similar thing that is happening here. the long awnser, however includes something about the hive-mind here, and how contradictory thoughts are necessarry in such situations, and how we are either uncertian yet, as a community, or how there is some sort of complex idea where bumbling idiot and evil genius can possibly be united in some form. as for myself, i tend to view bush the same way jello biafra did, for awhile at least. he's harmless. it's the people behind him who are the trouble. and i think if you looked to the highest ecconomic strata in the united states, you would see there is a correlation with the people behind bush.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Corporations, a legal fiction created a century ago to facilitate American capitalism, have become first class citizens in America, relegating humans to second class citizens. Corporations have the rights of humans, specifically property, but without the liabilities. They can't be arrested, incarcerated, or face criminal corrections. If convicted of an offense, they can be fined, and restrained from certain specific acts. But it turns out that they can be executed. Revoking a corporation's charter, granted at incorporation by one of the several states, effectively cuts out the heart of the corporate entity. Corporate malfeasance was forseen as a risk when invented by the 19th century government, and mitigated by this recourse. But it requires citizens to protect ourselves, and to organize to use our state attorneys general to protect us. Corporations are not sacred; there should be more of them on Death Row than are humans.
--
make install -not war
In a "free market economy," truth, like everything else, is a commodity. Now, would you like to super-size your truth today?
Very good points are brought up in the alleged essay by Bush Sr. Although the article is cited simply to point out the shortcomings of our current President, history has shown that the Bush Sr. essay was only partially correct. For example, the various massacres that followed the U.S withdrawal from Iraq in '92 were FAR more disturbing than what's going on now as we try and assist Iraq in establishing some sort of self-maintainable peace...
I used to fear clowns...but I'm discovering that chimps are far, far, worse.
I'm probably wasting my time here...
but please read the article and even the post you are responding to.
1) Most posters are *not* arguing conspiracy theories or even illegal acts. Time can remove a single article if they so desire; however, it is difficult to see how this could have been accidental (see below), and I for one would like to know who decided to remove the article, and why.
2) This could not have been an accidental removal or typo as you described. The table of contents for the issue is still available -- this is a single document -- but the link to this one article was removed. Even if there are people such as you described, wandering around Time's archives deleting random, un-backed-up files accidentally, I don't think this person would have have:
* accidentally opened this table-of-contents document from 5 years ago
* accidentally removed a single link and a few linebreaks
* accidentally saved the document
* deleted the article document that the link pointed to, and then
* lost all memory of these "accidents" and failed to restore the documents from backup.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
> Clearly this article was ++ungood, and needed to be edited by one of the historians at the Ministry of Truth...err, Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that this article will re-appear shortly in it's correct form, proving George Bush Sr. desperately wanted to invade Iraq and capture Sadaam during the first Gulf War, but was thwarted by the evil schemings of Eastasia...err, the Liberals.
<bartinfetalposture>
Must repress memories again, must repress memories again, must repress memories again,
</bartinfetalposture>
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It shows that the situation in Iraq was understood 3 years before 9/11.
It shows that the situation in Iraq was understood back in 1990.
So why did Bush think that the situation would be different now?
I was trying to find a fairly recent editorial I read in Windows 2000 magazine on the winnetmag.com web site. It was pro-Linux and fairly critical of Microsoft. It appears to have been removed. Google is not coughing it up from history either.
I feel the same way about the political PR wordgames. Conservatives want to change everything (to an Antebellum fantasy), Liberals want to constrain Liberty (in favor of License, as per John Milton). Republicans want Empire, and apparently hereditary monarchy, although Democrats seem lately to be living up to their etymology, at least rhetorically.
--
make install -not war
You can see the reasonable, sincere parent post, in spite of the reactionary moderator's unaccountable dislike of it.
--
make install -not war
Ad a bit of food for thought, here is a relevant selection from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the term 'memory hole':
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.
With lobbying (== bribing) how can one expect an honest politicians and government bodies etc? Step out of line and you lose your financing.
With blatant media control, how can one expect an honest media? While America has a constitution that protects free speech, the White House supresses it by limiting access to friendly press.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It goes to show the immense influence government agents have over mainstream media. The biggest lie of this decade is that the media is liberal. In the televised news world, CNN is also known to be heavily influenced by government agents, and Fox News is a lost cause.
The Memory Hole should be rewarded for their vigilance against lies from mainstream media. Sadly, most people think that mainstream media will protect them from government abuse by reporting on those abuses. Yet, Time has proven that as a corporate animal it is obviously too immature to ensure its own good conduct. What we need is a news organization that operates on democratic, not strictly capitalistic principles. Raw capitalism is fine for most organizations. But, news, worthy news, is not one of them. A democratic organization must be behind the news broadcast or print, not a bottom-line oriented organization. Think of Ben Franklin as the person who started a newspaper for the cause of man, not the image of Ben on that greenback which has the ability to alter the truth so readily.
Get your democratic news here and here.
= 9J =
I was able to find the article (including full text) on my first try in ProQuest:
Publication title: Time. New York: Mar 2, 1998. Vol. 151, Iss. 8; pg. 31, 1 pgs
Source Type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 0040781X
ProQuest document ID: 26630563
I agree there's no good reason why a PRINTED magazine should act as if something is deleted. Even in the case of libel or similar, its not as if the published is required to collect all offending magazines and reissue them.
2 independent and reputable references to the disappearing article I think sufficiently proves the main point of this article.
Clearly, "they" will keep doing this when they need to, the question is what can we do to detect/stop it, especially when it doesn't exist in print or search databases are required to make historical changes?
You're the only one talking about technical bugs, ok? Don't get so fixated on that, that you miss the rest of it. I'm not making *any* arguments for or against technical bugs. All I'm saying is that given the nature of the establishment where the incident occurred, government complicity is unlikely.
You're assuming a malicious intent without counting the other possibilities. I've already considered malicious intent, and it is less probable than you think - given the magazine's past, its resistance to conservative viewpoints, its independence.. this would be a scoop of the first magnitude, "GOVERNMENT PRESSURES FREE PRESS, PROOF INSIDE", cmon. They'd have put out a special issue for it, even.
If this were a government snow job, it would have leaked by now.. cos that's what these guys do, is sniff out stories like this. Regardless of their politics, investigative journalists generally don't take any shit from anyone. Some of them have even been known to go to jail over their ideals and their feelings about 'freedom of the press'. The mighty Time roll over? I think not.
[
Exposing myself as a complete and utter tool, does anyone remember Mike Baron touching on this topic in the "Next Nexus" series? Nexus goes to the Librarian of the Universe and changes what's recorded in history to halt a war between two races. Within days the new "history" starts to filter down into peoples' "memories." That's the one thing that troubles me about Google (and any replacement)-- if we begin to rely on it without considering any editorial slant, how do we force a private institution to behave in the optimal manner and/or detect when they've gone off the rails?
The US government is at it as wel....
t m
http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/draft-boards.h
--------
On 23 Sept 2003, the Defense Department Website called "Defend America" posted a notice for people to join local draft boards. "If a military draft becomes necessary," the notice explained, "approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines."
In early November, that notice started to receive media attention, with articles from the Associated Press, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , the Oregonian, the Toronto Star, the BBC, and London Guardian (unsurprisingly, none of the major papers or networks in the US covered it).
In a familiar turn of events, the notice suddenly disappeared from the Website. (Thanks to LG for pointing this out.) We've mirrored the page and posted the text below.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
And when bees raid flowers, they crosspollinate entire countrysides. Their constructive work feeds not only themselves, but all their neighbors, including the apiary who harvests their honey. And their sustainable industry is the keystone in their self-perpetuating ecosystem. No wonder Ben Franklin favored them so.
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make install -not war
How can we keep corporate America honest?"
There are plenty out there that see REMOVAL of that article as the honest move by Time. To them, it should have been mod'ed -1 (Flamebait).
The argument: The article was Bush, Sr.'s opinion 4 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and to ignore that is being dishonest to your readership. To take it out of context and purport it has relevant for today is dishonest journalism.
It's interesting how being honest is not a black and white issue. Think about that before you ask a company (or an individual, for that matter) to be honest; you are really asking them to use your definition of honesty.
Back to programming... where true is true and never false.
but are we having fun yet? this i need to know.
After I read this I was not impressed.
9 80302/ special_report.clintons_29.html
0 ,11627 ,1101980302,00.html
I sent daily@timeinc.net a response to their censorship.
I have not received a reply yet.
----Original Message------
It came to my attention that the Time.com website recently removed an article titled, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam", published March 2. 1998.
Here is the URL:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/
At first glance one might think could sincerely be a fluke deletion of the page, however the table of contents for this magazine was altered as well.
Here is the URL:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/toc/list/
This behavior raises certain questions about the validity of what everyday people like myself read:
What motives Time would have for manipulating information in this fashion ?
Who's interest is Time attempting to protect by removing such a document ?
How long has this type of censoring taken place ?
What other American publications are willing to smoke screen the truth ?
If Time was told "jumping off bridges is patriotic", would they go do it ?
What assurance can Time give any reader now, that what they publish isn't filtered.
Was the removal of the article an attempt to quell would be doubters, on the validity of the current struggle overseas ?
I am concerned and would like answers.
The link in the parent post. Read that. Click on the link and then tell me where the article is referenced on that page.
/. article is about how the article has been removed from Time and how MemoryHole has it. You can read, can't you?
The
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.
Hmm... how much d'ya reckon it would cost to get GHW Bush into a software project management position?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Asking this question presumes that Corporate America is honest now.
This is why we still need real libraries with hard copy in them. Thousands of them, scattered across the country, with dedicated staff in them. The quality of a civilation can be judged by its libraries. One copy on a MASTER ARCHIVE can be changed and history is GMF. I do not want my world Gone Mother Fucker.
...but almost everything in this post is wrong:
Well, because it's another example of the Internet being used to catch historical revisionism in the act.
Sounds like a good reason to me.
This one really has me confused. Are you saying that you are so convinced that Time is biased against Bush that, when presented with clear evidence of the opposite, you reject reality rather than rejecting your own flawed hypothesis?
What isn't new information? The fact Time is revising old content? (Clearly that is new information.) The historical reasoning behind the decision to halt the first Gulf War at the time it was halted? (See below.)
Nonsense. The choosing of the exact point at which the war was ended was not a key issue at the time the war ended (although it had become one by the time of the book from which this Time piece was excerpted). The White House did little at the time to explain its exact movtives and reporters did not push them on it. For a long time it was assumed (especially by Bush's conservative critics) that Bush was unduly influenced by the State Department and the U.N.
That hypothesis had been shattered by people who had been witness to the discussions. They reported it was Schwarzkopf and Powell who had argued for a fairly quick end to the war. According to these reports, the State Department, foreign leaders, and the United Nations had not been part of the decision-making process at all. It was suggested that the primary reasons for ending the war that were brought up in these discussions were the risk of a quagmire and Powell's concern about the psychological damage that was accruing to U.S. soldiers from killing virtually defenseless Iraqis (I know this sounds silly, but that was reportedly his argument).
In these accounts, Bush alone was arguing to continue the war (not as far as Baghdad, but at least for another day). We now know the commanders on the ground were planning to take the whole country, but that military leaders at the Pentagon were much more cautious (or even pessimistic). Remember that at the time of the war many were predicting heavy causalties and a bloodbath. Bush was questioned after he left office by the press about the exact decision-making process and repeatedly refused to say much about why he had called it off when he did.
It was against this backdrop that the book by Bush and Scowcroft appeared. The fact that it was considered news at the time is reflected in the fact that Time chose to run an excerpt. Many thought Bush was trying quash the growing impression that he had not made the final decision (or had somehow disagreed with it). Others interpreted it as an attempt to take responsibility off Powell, whose political star was rising.
Historians are still looking for a definitive picture of the decision process behind the abrupt end to the first Gulf War. It has turned out to be one of the most important decisions since the decision to accept an armistice (in return for reparations) instead of pushing for unconditional surrender at the end of the First World War. It promises to have as profound an effect on the first half of 21st century as the armistice did on the first half of the 20th.
The Bush-Sco
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
You think your worldview is rooted in reality yet you think there are only two possible opinions? Why do you think that someone has to be retarded to be incompetent?
bush's job is to rubberstamp the decisions that are made by his advisors. he is not evil or stupid. just trying to find more time for naps, tv and snacks like most of his country.
i don't believe that entirely but i know that he doesn't make all the decisions that we think he does.
fear is the mind killer
Now, the /. article said that the Time article had been removed.
:)
You've found a line that says that all of that issue has been moved to paid only access.
Now, go to that paid only access and find that article. Go ahead.
You'll spend your money and then you'll discover that the article is not in the paid access area.
The article is gone. It has been deleted. The article is not freely available on Time's website, nor is it available in Time's paid access site.
The article has been deleted.
It is not available for free or for money on Time's website.
It is not there any more.
Go ahead. Find it on Time's paid access site and post the url.
The article isn't even listed in the table of contents that you can access for free.
The article was purged from the site AND the reference in the table of contents was purged.
Yet you have trouble understanding that. Even when you cannot find the article on Time's website yourself.
Go ahead. Try. Show me that I'm wrong and post the url.
The article is not available on Time's website in either free form or under paid access.
You are wrong and the reference you cited is wrong.
But at least both of you are wrong together.
This seems to be a trend on your part. You don't seem to be able to read and understand the links.
I'm a foreign student in the US; I'm leaving as soon as I can. A large fraction of the other foreign students I know feel the same way, and for most of us this is a new feeling brought about by the way the US has changed in the last two years. Nor is it just students.
And it really is just the last two years - just today I met a man from my country who's been at this university for the last 45 years, and he said he wishes he could go back, just because of the changes in the last two years.
Becoming an unfriendly country doesn't just hurt non-Americans, either. The US's economic might depends heavily on its technological edge, and on attracting the best and brightest from around the world to contribute their abilities. By scaring away talented foreigners, the US threatens to put a damper on the source of its wealth and power.
Even if you don't care about America's reputation, think of it this way: these policies will affect your wallet.
Is this a dream? Some sort of right-wing/communist hybrid (actually, that would technically make it a middle-of-the-road liberal democricy?), but anyway, it's amusing to find corporate (magazine) america "editing history by ommision"...what it it about the corporate right-wing media, do they not understand the concept of hyper-linking and the purpose of the internet, or are they typically so intersted in maintaining the world-wiew of the right-wingers of the world by this stunt. For years, the right-wing in the world proudly stated that the press in the west was a FREE press that put out ALL ideas (not cover-ups etc, no REVISIONIST HISTORY that the EVIL COMMYS were trying to pollute our minds, etc. Too bad the cold war ended... and too bad the real face of the media and corporate interests (SCO anybody?) is now trying to go back to the usual "lets brainwash the unwashed masses".
Both the current president and past president Bush do not have a junionr or senior attached to their names.
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
The important point here is that we had a general mid-east foreign policy of containment and tolerance. The thought was that if we didn't step on the toes of the Arab nations, they would play nice and everybody could generally get along. While this seemed logical--and certainly would have worked in most cases--it didn't account for the brewing religious fanaticism of the jihadists and their rapidly increasing influence over those in power in the region. It is a scenario not unlike the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Both deviant groups represent a violent goal of intolerance and eradication. For the Nazi's, it was the Jews and other non-Aryans. For the jihadists, it is western civilization. Trouble is, these types of groups are not dissuaded by passifism or concessions. It is fallacy to believe that their cause is based upon attainable political goals or even revenge. These people hate irrationally because that is what they have been brainwashed to do. Like Germany in the 20's and 30's, the largely impoverished Arab world is a breeding ground for radicalism. As a backdrop to all of this radicalism, we have the rest of the civilian population. While most are not actually radicals, they are still bombarded with state-sponsored propaganda and controlled by fear. In Germany, it was propaganda about how much of a 'problem' the Jews were and how glorious the third reich would be. For the Arab world, it is propaganda about how 'evil' the western world is and how it should be fought and subdued.
So what's the solution? There certainly is no easy answer. If we pull out completely, the jihadist infection continues to spread, brewing more hate, disillusionment, and eventually international terrorism. (while at the same time ruining the lives of ordinary civilians in those countries) It's really a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. Ultimately, as with Naziism, the only answer is to destroy the radicals and then help the rest of the civilians move on, even while many may still hate us until propaganda and national pride subsides.
Who Rules America?
The Alien Grip on Our News and Entertainment Media Must Be Broken
By the Research Staff of National Vanguard Books
P.O. Box 330 Hillsboro West Virginia 24946 USA
There is no greater power in the world today than that wielded by the manipulators of public opinion in America. No king or pope of old, no conquering general or high priest ever disposed of a power even remotely approaching that of the few dozen men who control America's mass media of news and entertainment.
Their power is not distant and impersonal; it reaches into every home in America, and it works its will during nearly every waking hour. It is the power that shapes and molds the mind of virtually every citizen, young or old, rich or poor, simple or sophisticated.
The mass media form for us our image of the world and then tell us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know -- or think we know -- about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, or our television.
It is not just the heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories from our newspapers or the blatant propagandizing of history-distorting TV "docudramas" that characterizes the opinion-manipulating techniques of the media masters. They exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in their management of the news and the entertainment that they present to us.
For example, the way in which the news is covered: which items are emphasized and which are played down; the reporter's choice of words, tone of voice, and facial expressions; the wording of headlines; the choice of illustrations -- all of these things subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear.
On top of this, of course, the columnists and editors remove any remaining doubt from our minds as to just what we are to think about it all. Employing carefully developed psychological techniques, they guide our thought and opinion so that we can be in tune with the "in" crowd, the "beautiful people," the "smart money." They let us know exactly what our attitudes should be toward various types of people and behavior by placing those people or that behavior in the context of a TV drama or situation comedy and having the other TV characters react in the Politically Correct way.
Molding American Minds
For example, a racially mixed couple will be respected, liked, and socially sought after by other characters, as will a "take charge" Black scholar or businessman, or a sensitive and talented homosexual, or a poor but honest and hardworking illegal alien from Mexico. On the other hand, a White racist -- that is, any racially conscious White person who looks askance at miscegenation or at the rapidly darkening racial situation in America -- is portrayed, at best, as a despicable bigot who is reviled by the other characters, or, at worst, as a dangerous psychopath who is fascinated by firearms and is a menace to all law-abiding citizens. The White racist "gun nut," in fact, has become a familiar stereotype on TV shows.
The average American, of whose daily life TV-watching takes such an unhealthy portion, distinguishes between these fictional situations and reality only with difficulty, if at all. He responds to the televised actions, statements, and attitudes of TV actors much as he does to his own peers in real life. For all too many Americans the real world has been replaced by the false reality of the TV environment, and it is to this false reality that his urge to conform responds. Thus, when a TV scriptwriter expresses approval of some ideas and actions through the TV characters for whom he is writing, and disapproval of others, he exerts a powerful pressure on millions of viewers toward conformity with his own views.
And as it is with TV entertainment, so it is also with the news, whether televised or printed. The insidious thing about this form of thought control is that even when we rea
Isn't that the whole point of these telescreens? The state can obliterate history, but everything you do is recorded and available to them. Or am I remembering 1984 wrong?
How hard would it be to build a personal wayback machine? A modified proxy, perhaps, that would keep a snapshot of every version of every page you ever visited. Then it wouldn't matter if something got removed from the web. Anything I saw at least once, I could see again.
Sure, it'd gobble up storage, but storage is cheap.
If enough people ran personal wayback machines, it'd be harder for someone to unpublish something.
At the moment, if you come from a visa country, the hoops and extra costs associated even with an ordinary tourist visa, let alone a business visa or a study visa mean that you go somewhere else.
Hooray for the Splendid Isolationists, shame for everyone else and the jobs that the visitors represent.
If you look at the table of contents from archive.org from over two years ago, it is not listed, either. That it is not listed in the table of contents is nothing new, it was not in there before. It was apparently not in there when the Memory Hole first posted its article (it certainly wasn't in there before).
1 101980302-138662,00.html, but the article in question was at a URL that looked like http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302/ special_report.clintons_29.html. It's a different style of URL, it's no wonder it doesn't work.
And yes, the URLs currently show one paragraph, and then the rest of the article, but those new URLs look like http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
It does appear to have been removed, as I cannot find "Scowcroft" in a search from March 1-3 1998, but I can find "Nelan" (the author of the above URL that redirects, "Selling The War Badly"), and I can find it no other searches. But that it does not appear in the TOC from over two years ago, and that the URL is of a different style than the others from that TOC, makes me think someone else is going on than the various conspiracy theories seen in this discussion.
The misunderstanding has nothing to do with being "balanced"; you just didn't make it clear you were being sarcastic.
I think the message you were responding to was sarcastic. The phrases "You obviously haven't been swallowing the official line on this" and "No, don't think about it!" indicate that the author believes the opposite of what he is saying; i.e. that more than just France disagrees.
This response was in agreement with the sarcastic parent message: "As opposed to now, right? When you had all that support from the UN and all of those Arab countries." The "As opposed to now, right?" indicates that the author is arguing against the parent message, so I took the second sentence as sarcasm.
Your message had nothing to indicate that you knew your first sentence was false; so I had no way to know you were being sarcastic. I thought the sentence was support for your argument that "The coalition is more than just the US and the UK"; which is true, but not of the countries you give in your example.
Of course I could be wrong about which messages are sarcastic and which ones aren't. Sarcasm is a tricky tool, especially when both readers and writers are in a hurry and can miss subtle signs. At least I understand your position now, even if I didn't get it from your original post.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Maybe you can go to the Table of Contents and find a listing for that article? After all, the Table of Contents is free.
/. article was about?
And it isn't just me that you'd be proving wrong. Did you forget that that was what the
Poor little baby. You've been proven wrong again. And again. And again.
Does it hurt?
You cried because I said that neither was an accurate depiction.
Now you're crying again.
> revising the "official" records to expunge subjects
A tangent: in the 90's I worked in the former USSR in a Christian mission.
We published a lot of printed materials, and worked closely with the big local publishers.
Once, we had a book printed and bound, and discovered an error just before they were scheduled to go to distributors.
The error was serious enough to rectify, but we had little hope until we talked to the printing house.
The representative showed how they could slice a page out of each book and replace it with a different one,
then said "in Soviet times, we used to do it quite often!"
And that's how we solved that problem.
I saw a better one:
BUSH ORWELL 2004
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I'll post, in my journal, their response.
Sorry, but FAIRs standards of truthfulness are sadly lacking. They were, for instance, behind the infamous Super Bowl battering hoax. It's organizations like FAIR - not just corporations - that need to be kept honest.
> We don't have to prove it *isn't* a conspiracy. You have to prove that it *is*.
No, I don't either. Firstly, it was available on the archive, and now not only is the article gone, but the reference to it in the table of contents. This would indicate that its removal was purposeful. Secondly? There is no secondly. I put forward that its removal was because of politics. I have thought over the possibilities, and I can find no reason that fits the circumstances better than TIME removing the document at request. There are certainly many reasons short of governmental conspiracy to remove it, but frankly, that's not my problem with it. My problem with it is that even if it's just one person scrapping it for personal reasons, it's abominable journalism to bury the story. For any reason. If it needed to be removed for copyright/republishing reasons, simply directing the reader from an intact table of contents to a message stating that it was removed to be published elsewhere would have been acceptable. Pretending that it didn't exist is the wrong approach, and it doesn't frighten me so much as it incenses me.
Virg
You had a reply on China already. Here is my take on Russian education (I give "practical" lessons on something like "exchange markets" in one of the "universities"). Students use a calculator to multiply by ten. Then don't know how to build a graph of a function. They don't know jack shit. About anything. They are completely stupid and know nothing at all whatsoever and I REALLY mean it. They majority of kids graduating today from schools and from universities DON'T FUCKING KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL, their minds are completely blank, believe me. Students majoring in construction don't know the standard size of a brick, for fuck's sake! And don't believe anyone who says otherwise, like that Russian clown from Harvard or anybody else.
:(
Russia is rated ~25th on most international studies on education quality (math, literacy, natural sciences, things like that), that is, behind almost all developed countries, somewhere with Mexico and Brazil.
Soviet education was quite good, Russian education simply no longer exists.
Japan might have its share of problems, but Japanese students sonsistently get top scores in math and natural sciences, together with South Koreans. Finns top the scores on literacy.
P.S. Sorry to ruin it for you.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The story was about Time.
/. article says that it was removed at Time.
/. article says it is not, then you were wrong.
The story wasn't about whether you could find copies of that article through other means.
The story was about Time.
The story wasn't about whether Foxnews would do this.
The story was about Time.
You claimed that that article was available through paid access.
The
You refused to prove that it was available at Time, through paid access or otherwise.
Now you're crying some more.
Is the article available, as you claimed, through paid access or otherwise at Time?
If it is not, as the
Then you were wrong.
It hurts when you're wrong, doesn't it? It makes you cry, doesn't it?
> Couldn't it be that they didn't have the rights to publish this piece online? It's pretty common to break up electronic/world/us/etc. rights in publishing, and it's possible that Time only had rights to publish this in its magazine in print form.
Then leaving in the table of contents reference, and having it link to a page saying the article was removed for copyright reasons, possibly with a link or reference so the interested could find it, would have been appropriate. Trying to make like it never existed is improper journalism.
Virg
Posted: Dec 3rd, 1984.
Wanted: Dedicated editor for the task of auditing past documents for "innacuracies". Must be profficient in latest edition of newspeak.
Starting: Right away, needed to replace previous employee who recently perished in an "accident".
Edited: Dec 4th, 1984.
Revised: Dec 11th, 1984.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
The Brent Scowcroft book that this material ended up in is searchable at Amazon.com
Not sure if anyone tried clicking on the link recently, but it doesn't give a 404, and instead gives an explanation as to why it isn't there. Unfortunate they can't still list it in the table of contents to reflect the fact that it was originally in the magazine... and you can likely imagine that the publisher did not act on its own in requesting that time online not sell the piece through their web site. Here's what you get when you click on the link at the memory hole: The page you've requested is an excerpt from a book by Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush titled A World Transformed, which appeared in the March 2, 1998, issue of TIME magazine under the title "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". It has been removed from our site because the publisher did not grant us rights to sell the piece online through the TIME archive.
Is that so hard for you to admit?
The article is not where you said it was.
You did not even check to see if it was there. You just went off about how I was wrong.
I asked you to show that I was wrong. All you had to do was to go to the spot you claimed the article was at and give me the url. That's all.
You refused. You didn't check your facts. You went off about me being wrong and you refused to show a url proving it. Instead, you go off about Foxnews and Internet Archive neither of which have any bearing upon the story.
Now you ask if I'm twelve? What does my age have to do with whether you were wrong or not? I'm 22. Yet I have enough maturity to check my facts. I don't care how many years you have. Years do not accurately reflect emotional maturity.
You were crying because you were, again, shown to be wrong.
Go ahead and tell me that you're older than I am. That still won't change the fact that you were wrong. But it will support my opinion about your emotional immaturity.
You may not be as intelligent as I am.
You may not be as emotionally mature as I am.
You may not be as attractive as I am.
But you can rest easy in the knowledge that you're older than I am. So you weren't completely wrong about that article being deleted because you're older.
Is that it?
*Yawn* the draft boards never went away, and they've always been looking for people to fill the posts on them. Wake up and smell the coffee/pot/etc, it's your own problem if you can't pay attention to what's going on in your own back yard.
And yes, there is a real problem with people not paying attention to the issues going on in their own backyard, after all...much easier for say Canadians to blame Americans for all their woes, or radical-lefties scream about how 9/11 was all America's fault rather then radical fundamentalist Islam's and Saudi Arabia's.
Om, nomnomnom...
According to the all-too-credulous Declan McCullagh, Time pulled the excerpt from their archive because they'd only been given permission to publish it for a short time. But this is a lame excuse. Had Time been given permission to publish the excerpt for a short period, it would likely have been a month or two, not six years. The fact that it was pulled only two months ago clearly indicates a political motivation -- perhaps the same one that caused CBS to pull its miniseries on Ronald Reagan.
The page you've requested is an excerpt from a book by Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush titled A World Transformed, which appeared in the March 2, 1998, issue of TIME magazine under the title "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". It has been removed from our site because the publisher did not grant us rights to sell the piece online through the TIME archive.
/. caught wind of the removal?
Is this what it always said, or did they change it because
Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!
EVERY F#*KING TIME! I get so tired of all this paranoid script-kiddy-level conspiracy mongering on slashdot. Bush! Haliburton! The Trilateral Commission! The boogey man!
EVERY. DAMN. TIME. there turns out to be some thoroughly unremarkable reason behind it all. But that never stops these idiots from piling on.
I mean, think about it -- it just didn't make sense. Why would:
a. Time, a magazine protected by the first amendment,
b. knuckle under, to
c. pressure improbably brought by the Bush administration
d. to remove an article available from many other sources
e. that discusses things that are well-known anyway.
Think, people.
As Declan and others have suggested, it's true: TIME has no rights to re-publish the book excerpt which first appeared in TIME's March 2, 1998 issue (and online that week). The book, "A World Transformed," by George H.W. Bush (Sr.) and Brent Scowcroft, was published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc.; the authors and the publisher hold the rights. The headline on the excerpt in TIME was "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam." A notice was posted to the TIME.com website on Nov. 11, 2003, to clarify why this excerpt is not available through TIME Archives: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302/ special_report.clintons_29.html
"The page you've requested is an excerpt from a book by Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush titled A World Transformed, which appeared in the March 2, 1998, issue of TIME magazine under the title "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". It has been removed from our site because the publisher did not grant us rights to sell the piece online through the TIME archive."
Thanks for the opportunity to clarify this.
- Diana Pearson for TIME magazine
"The page you've requested is an excerpt from a book by Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush titled A World Transformed, which appeared in the March 2, 1998, issue of TIME magazine under the title "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". It has been removed from our site because the publisher did not grant us rights to sell the piece online through the TIME archive."
You people need to lay off politics and stick to technology because you really have no clue.
Break the tinfoil hats out people, we are going to talk about Bush!
I am going to do something productive. I am going for a walk.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
"Another explanation is more likely. And, yes, a quick search turns up a May 2003 article from Slate that debunks this rumor. It turns out that Time Inc. only had permission from the publisher to post the content for a limited time."
Well, that's all right then...
If you see this as being as hot as Newsweek burying the Lewinski report until Drudge forced them to release it, you guys are dreaming. Seeing what you dweebs have rated so highly here, it's not hard to figure out where you're coming from. Is that ``insightful'' enough for you?
From Declan's link:
In this spirit, the Memory Hole posted an essay by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," excerpted from their book A World Transformed and published in the March 2, 1998, edition of Time magazine. At the time of the Memory Hole posting, Sept. 21, 2002, the essay could still be found on Time's Web site. When the essay disappeared from Time's site sometime afterward, the Memory Hole noted its disappearance in a text box accompanying the essay. The essay doesn't exist in Time's Nexis archives, either.
The suggestion is that Time might cleanse its archives for political reasons. But Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly says, "There's nothing nefarious here." He explains that book publishers often insist on limiting online use of an excerpt to the period the physical magazine is on the newsstand.
Might I suggest that Time would alienate its readership less by replacing the content of the omitted article with a statement that this material was only temporarily there, rather than disappearing the article entirely?
I'm not convinced that there was a nefarious purpose here, but I'm not convinced there wasn't either. All I can say is, good thing Memory Hole is there.
Here's what it says.
"The page you've requested is an excerpt from a book by Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush titled A World Transformed, which appeared in the March 2, 1998, issue of TIME magazine under the title "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". It has been removed from our site because the publisher did not grant us rights to sell the piece online through the TIME archive."
Welcome to the wonderful world of online publishing. This is, of course, a huge cop-out.
Lao-tzu is often mentioned as a philosopher of ancient China. However, after actually reading the work attributed to him, the Tao Te Ching, it becomes clear that his audience was never the common public on the street, but rather the emperor and anyone else in power. The pith of the text, loosely paraphrased, works out to
From that perspective, I think it fair to say that the US government is increasingly Taoist. In all the worst ways.
--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I searched for the string: "George Orwell and media revisionism".
:)
My reply:
No documents found for George Orwell and media revisionism
Kinda says it all doesn't it?
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
I paid for access and verified that the story was not there.
Let's see how many times you can be wrong in one story.
First you believe what someone else said without even reading the Table of Contents.
Then you claim that I would not spend the time checking my facts.
Now you're claiming that because the story is available via other sources, the original story about the article not being at Time is wrong?
You were wrong on your statement because you failed to check the facts and now you are thrashing around trying to find anything that will lessen your embarassment at being publicly rebuked for such.
I embarassed you in public.
That hurt your pride. That is why I asked you if it hurt.
The reason they haven't tried to remove it from archive.org is very simple. Read the update to the story. There wasn't a conspiracy.
But then, I never said there was one.
Are you going for another factual error?
I'm not the goof that says there's no liberal media. Prove to me that there's not. Show me how the major networks and major newspapers, (NYTimes, San Fran Chron., Washington Post, and especially the LATimes) don't have a liberal bias. Show me the conversative bias in any of them.
You can't, and you can't cite any examples to prove your point. Pretty lame.
Your claim of no "liberal media" is complete bullshit.
Do YOU know what expunged means? I didn't, until I started working at the Courthouse. It is a comman fallicy that when records are 'expunged' they are destroyed. Actually, they are removed from the publicly available index system, and the physical records are stored in a different place, but they ARE available for law enforcement agencies to peruse if they feel so inclined... This applies to Missouri, other places may vary...
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
The explosion of weblogs and other peer-to-peer media mean that it is more difficult than ever before to create a "1984" society.
Absolutely nothing - go for your life. But be warned, the fact that information come from a "source" leads to it's unfortunate reality that it is always biased to some degree. Sheesh - everyone knows that.
Is that the best you can do? Accuse me of being a Saddam lover - how about a Saddam enabler? Or... How about I'm just disturbed that my "democratic" representatives used my hard earned taxes to go about killing people? Do they still call it murder where you come from?
Hey it is my planet, it's your planet, in fact you're right - it's *everyones* f#cking planet. And we already have a bad name - look at how we behave.
- the Fucktard.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!